WEEK 12 - Substitute Teachers

If you read my blog last week, you'll know that lately, I've been pushing myself quite a bit. And it finally caught up with me. I spent all of Sunday sick in bed, tried to push through and teach Monday (a mistake), then ended up having to take Tuesday and Wednesday off because I was pretty miserably sick.

For teachers, taking a sick day is not just a matter of calling in sick and catching up on your work when you get back. On Tuesday morning when I made the decision to call in sick, I still had to work an hour in the morning, while I could barely think because I was so miserable, to create a lesson for a substitute. 

The idea of a substitute teacher is that they will fill in and continue teaching whatever the teacher was on at the time. This rarely happens, especially for language teachers, since most substitute teachers don't speak Spanish. It's especially hard for lower levels of Spanish, since the lower the level, the more the students depend on the teacher to learn. In contrast, my level 5/6 class is pretty easy to prepare for, because they have enough skills to be able to read articles and write papers in Spanish (which is what they did while I was gone). Spanish 1 is always more difficult, because you can't expect the substitute to know how to teach different aspects of language.

Getting a substitute is a pretty easy process these days. I just go online to a website that Minneapolis uses, put in what day I'll be out, then it'll show up on the website as an opening which any available sub can snatch up when they log in. 

Getting a good sub is very important. Having a bad sub can mean having to do damage control the day you get back. One time last year I came back from being sick and the desks were all over the place, some overturned, books strewn all over the floor, a book that was stuck to the floor with gum, the attendance was recorded wrong, every student in one of my classes got 100% on the quiz (never leave a quiz with a sub) etc... It was a disaster. When I asked the students what happened, they all said that he just sat behind the desk watching Seinfeld the whole hour. One of my classes even said that he put Seinfeld up on the overhead so they could watch because the students weren't doing their work. Needless to say, he was never called back to Washburn. 

A good sub, on the other hand, is one that interacts with students, tries to help them out even if they're not experts in the content area, takes attendance, has the students straighten things up at the end of the hour, and leaves a note on what went on that day. There are many that do this, but they tend to get snatched up as teachers pretty quickly, so you have to find new good subs the next year. 

My hours for week 12, pretty short due to being sick most of the week. 

Day	Date	Start	End	Total Hours
M	11/5/2012	7:30 AM	4:15 PM	8.75
		7:45 PM	9:15 PM	1.25
T	11/6/2012	6:00 AM	7:00 AM	1
		10:00 PM	10:45 PM	0.75
W	11/7/2012	8:00 PM	8:45 PM	0.75
Th	11/8/2012	7:00 AM	4:45 PM	9.75
F	11/8/2012	7:45 AM	4:00 PM	8.25
	Total			30.5